X-Powered-By and do search engines know

Hi
I noticed my server was still displaying extra headers for php files and I wondered if google etc may detect this and use this to tell if you are rewriting the url. The header is "X-Powered-By" and it lists the version of php running on the server to generate the php page. HTML files do not get this header sent (aka static content).
It would be simple for them to do it in my mind and if google indexes what it considers dynamic content, would showing this effect the index speed of your site or even possibly the rank?

For anyone wondering how to see if their server outputs the header just create a php file with phpinfo(); in it and then you search for "HTTP Response Headers". If X-Powered-By is listed then its exposing your php generated pages to the world.

To disable this edit your php.ini file and set:
expose_php = Off

Just a thought really.

I think the main thing to consider here is that just because it's php doesn't mean it's dynamic.

I can echo an entire html document if i was bored, it would have that header, yet be completely static.

I don't think it's an issue

Yeh I know what you mean, I just noticed in the thread:
Google.com: Dynamic vs. Static URLs

Your pages are dynamically generated. We're able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler could overwhelm and crash sites that serve dynamic content, we limit the number of dynamic pages we index.

Just wondered if the power-by was a factor they used to determine the index speed partly as well. I have turned it off just incase anyway and I will keep a eye out to see how many google bots I have hitting the site at once.

Originally Posted by briansol

I think the main thing to consider here is that just because it's php doesn't mean it's dynamic.

I can echo an entire html document if i was bored, it would have that header, yet be completely static.

I don't think it's an issue

That's true, but if it's php, most likely it is a dynamic page. Because just doing output of an html document would provide no value. If you had to take a guess, then if it's php you could assume it's dynamic information.

I wonder if search engines are catching not only the header or the file extension anymore, but also some tendency on the leading scripts on the web. It wouldn't be difficult to identify the main forum products, cms products.... as dynamic content. Just guessing.

google uses the term dynamic to mean "?"

ie, does the url have a querystring.

page.php?id=123

they will only index so many of the id=123 and id=456 pages, but even LESS of the id=123&go=456 (double dynamic)